To anticipate what is to occur is plainly one of the most useful achievements of mind, for all providence implies apprehension and emotion therewith. But to look before and after is certainly not the prerogative of man alone, but anticipatory power is found throughout the realm of mind, and constitutes the larger portion of all cognition. To know a thing means, in general, to appreciate its potentiality; and all science is really prescience. Knowledge is not the immediate sensation, but the meaning of it for life; it is the ideal translation from one sense to another in feeling tendency. Thus, to scent is by itself a useless acquirement, but the connecting it with desired food is of the utmost service. The psychism gradually attains the power to interpret by various media the nature, that is, the experienceability, of the environment.

To foresee is then one of the commonest events in mind, and according to the painfulness or pleasurability foreseen is felt anger or fear, hope or desire, or allied emotions. But the foreseen does not always come to pass, and hence there results a new order of intellectual and emotional reaction. That what we had in mind would happen comes not, or is other than foreseen; this has a disturbing effect on cognition and emotion. Prescience defeated becomes 164not merely nescience, but there is the positive definite shock of surprise, and the emotion of disappointment or some correlated form. Surprise as the sense of contrast of real and ideal, involving personal sense of limitation and error, is, as we have noted (pp. 50 ff.), a painful experience. But where there is no preconceived notion, no expectation, there is no surprise, as Lumholtz remarks of the Australian savages, that they are not surprised at the railway and other wonders of civilization; they do not know enough to be surprised. The full apprehension and understanding of the gap between ideal and real is but very slowly attained. At first the thwarting is naturally and easily attributed to an enemy, and there is anger and pertinacious violence, but ultimately, by sad and repeated experience, mind is led to notice its own insufficiency, to feel that the conflict between the actual and the expected is due to subjective error rather than objective interference. Genuine surprise, as distinct from mere nervous shock, is then, I think, a later phenomenon than is generally supposed. What is often taken for surprise with animals and children is really eager attention. Again, certain modes of fright are often taken for surprise. But experience must have made a considerable advance in apprehension of experienceability before a real surprise can be manifested, which is always the correlative of a sudden contrariness of experience to what was preconceived. Surprise involves a certain measure of a theory of experience; in short, a more or less definite body of knowledge. One who has framed no ideas of what experience should be can never be really surprised at whatever may happen. However, to be able to feel surprise is obviously very advantageous, to have a painful and sharp sense of the incongruity of real and ideal often conducts to that investigation which results in being prepared against being surprised in the same way again. The imperfectness of adaptation is thus consciously and intelligently remedied. The man of 165large resources, cautious nature, and keen insight and foresight, is little liable to be surprised, for in all circumstances he accurately forecasts a very wide range of possibilities.

When the good expected comes in less measure than was foreseen, or not at all, or some real evil instead, there is not merely surprise, but disappointment as well. When what is confidently expected does not happen, the emotional reaction is surprise; when what is eagerly hoped for does not occur, disappointment is the result. I am disappointed in not receiving a certain remittance I had hoped for. Here the ought to be, the expected, is ranged over against the actual not, as in surprise, as a sudden and painful change in cognition, but solely for the personal advantage missed. Disappointment is bound up with the sense of personal loss and detriment from the happening contrary to expectation. Feeling of disappointment is thus emotional reaction from cognizance of evil result where good is looked for. The more it was hoped for, the more bitter the disappointment. This disappointment has its function as an emphatic protest against impracticality; the lessons of experience are thus brought home and made memorable. Disappointment turns life from false dreams to stern realities; it prompts to an investigation of causes, and rouses cognition to a full understanding of the situation. Hope thereby becomes more and more rational and realizable.

In all disappointment we note that the feeling is not about the past as such, but is with reference to the immediately actual in its unexpected bearing on life. Thus it is not strictly retrospective emotion. Though often initial to regret and grief, it should not be confounded with these.

A curiously illogical remark, and one not uncommonly heard, is, “I hope you will succeed, but do not be disappointed if you don’t.” This is really a psychological 166Hibernicism. Hope is the foundation of disappointment, and one cannot say, “hope, but do not be disappointed,” in the same breath with definite meaning. We cannot escape the painful implications of unfulfilled desire: we cannot both have our cake and eat it too. Some measure of expectation of success is implied in all futuritive effort, hence a like measure of disappointment. The real sense of any such admonition can only be for moderating desire, and so tempering possible reaction. The expression in question amounts to little else than a phrase of well-wishing, but with little confidence in the actual result.

From the feeling of surprise and its congener, disappointment, it is natural to turn to the feeling for novelty. Surprise and novelty both relate, but in different ways, to the character of the experience in relation to other experiences. The strangeness, however, in what is surprising, and which makes it surprising, is not intrinsic, but wholly relative to a preconception. Thunder is familiar to me, but it may surprise me if it occur in January, and also totally out of my preconceived order; but a friend who has neither heard, nor heard of, thunder, will not be surprised by the sound in January, though he may be startled, and may feel the novelty of the phenomenon. The novel, purely as such, cannot surprise, for there is no field for the expectation which is the foundation of surprise. The surprising is always contrary to expectation, but the novel is simply unexpected, not in the range of thought and conception in any manner. A novel experience is one which has previously been unexperienced, and the feeling of novelty is the feeling of it as such, while a surprising experience goes quite against all we look for, and is often familiar and common enough, though sometimes it is novel, as when the absolutely new experience and not some familiar experience comes in place of the expected experience. If the man to whom thunder is novel is awaiting merely the pattering of rain, the crash of 167thunder will excite both feelings of surprise and novelty. In this case he is surprised before he feels the novelty of the surprising event.

A feeling for the novelty of an experience implies sense of experience and experienceable, and is thus debarred from primitive consciousness, which is merely a series of disconnected flashes, occurring a few times at the critical moments in an organism’s life. It is probable that in the origin of mind the first consciousness was the last, an entirely unique and isolated phenomenon in the animal’s life, hence supremely novel. However, at first, and undoubtedly also in later mind, consciousness but slowly rises to the sense of novelty of consciousness as such. After a long period of unconsciousness from any cause we do not appreciate returning consciousness as per se a comparatively novel phenomenon. In early mind every experience is practically a new experience, and so novel, but as there is no cognizance of experience in any light, and least of all in this light which is rather remote from immediate practicality, the feeling for novelty does not occur. Sense of novelty implies a comparison of experience purely for its own sake, certainly a very late acquirement. Thus in primitive mind, though all experiences are uniformly fresh, yet they are not appreciated as such. The feeling for novelty must always rest upon a considerable body of experience unified by ego-sense and apprehended as such, that is, consciousness of novelty implies both consciousness of consciousness and self-consciousness. The consciousness of novelty is thus far from being equivalent to novel consciousness. Whenever, even in advanced mind, a novel consciousness occurs, we should be over hasty if we at once concluded that feeling of novelty was also experienced.

The first step in life is to get an experience, to struggle into a consciousness which may be immediately valuable, and which is at once emotional and motor in its action; 168the second step is to compare and identify the experience gained so as to ascertain its meaning for life with greater certainty. Recognition thus comes early into play, but while the sphere of the sense of the novel lies in that of the unrecognised, it does not in any wise occupy the whole, for much that is unrecognised still is far from conveying feeling of novelty, because this feeling is, as we have said, far from being experienced on every presentation of the novel. The novel is equivalent rather to the unrecognisable. A dog may lose in a few months the power of recognising its master, yet the master after such a lapse of time cannot be said to awaken sense of novel. Though not recognised for master he is recognised as one of many familiar objects, he is known to be a man, and that is as far as the identification goes. The experience then is in reality not a fresh one. Here is a new man but there is nothing novel in the experience, much less is there a feeling of novelty. I doubt much if a dog or any lower animal notices and appreciates pleasurably or painfully the novel as such. The unrecognisable and unclassifiable presented to them may agitate them in various ways, as contrast a horse and a courageous dog on first seeing a locomotive, but there is no evidence of real feeling of the novelty of the experience as such. The enjoyment of the novel for its own sake is probably wholly confined to late human psychism.

It must, indeed, be granted that change from monotonous or confining circumstances is appreciated and appreciated pleasurably by lower animals, though they may not know enough to seek change for its own sake. Animals certainly suffer from ennui, and enjoy variety within certain limits, but change is not newness, and absolute change or novelty in strict sense hardly appeals to them, that is, they do not appreciate the novelty of a situation. The really novel disturbs them, they do not desire it nor are pleased with it. It is only in fact in the 169higher ranges of human mind that experience of any kind, novel or various, comes to be sought for its own sake. To say, “this is a novel sensation,” or “how novel and delightful,” and all similar expressions, denotes a frame of mind which is artificial, that is, lies away from and beyond the common course of psychism under natural selection. The changefulness of experience and the novelty of an experience are in reality two distinct elements. One who has been ill in bed for weeks enjoys the change in sitting up in his arm chair, but there is no real novelty or sense of novelty. Everything, we say, is novel and interesting to the child, tiresome and a bore to the blasé man of the world. The world is, in truth, fresh and new to the child, but the sense of the novel per se is very slowly developed, and the rarer the novel becomes, the more keen our appreci............